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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 | 9

It has been one of the most aggravating

sounds on earth for more than 100

million years — the humming buzz of a

mosquito.

She gently lands on your ankle and

inserts two serrated mandible cutting

blades and saws into your skin, while

two other retractors open a passage for

the proboscis. With this straw she sucks

your blood, while a sixth needle pumps

in saliva that contains an anticoagulant

that prevents that blood from clotting.

This shortens her feeding time, less-

ening the likelihood that you splat her

across your ankle.

The female mosquito needs your

blood to grow her eggs. Please don’t feel

singled out. She bites everyone. There is

no truth to the myths that mosquitoes

prefer women over men or blondes and

redheads over those with darker hair.

She does, however, play favorites. Type

O blood seems to be the vintage of

choice. Stinky feet emit a bacterium

that woos famished females, as do

perfumes. As a parting gift, she leaves

behind an itchy bump (an allergic reac-

tion to her saliva) and potentially some-

thing far worse: infection with one of

several deadly diseases, including

malaria, Zika, West Nile, dengue and

yellow fever.

Mosquitoes are our apex predator,

the deadliest hunter of human beings on

the planet. A swarming army of 100

trillion or more mosquitoes patrol

nearly every inch of the globe, killing

about 700,000 people annually. Re-

searchers suggest that mosquitoes may

have killed nearly half of the 108 billion

humans who have ever lived across our

200,000-year or more existence.

Flying solo, the mosquito does not

directly harm anyone. It is the diseases

she transmits that cause an endless

barrage of death. Yet without her, these

pathogens could not be vectored to

humans. Without her, human history

would be completely unrecognizable.

The mosquito and her diseases have

accompanied traders, travelers, sol-

diers and settlers (and their captive

African slaves) around the world and

have been far more lethal than any

manufactured weapons or inventions.

Malarious mosquitoes patrolling the

Pontine Marshes facilitated both the

rise and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Initially shielding the Eternal City from

the Visigoths, Huns and Vandals, they

eventually pointed their proboscises

inward on Rome itself. Mosquitoes

defended the Holy Land during the

Crusades by laying waste to armies of

cross-adorned Christian soldiers. By

infecting European soldiers with ma-

laria and yellow fever, they reinforced

numerous successful rebellions in the

Americas during the late 18th and early

19th centuries, including the British

surrender at Yorktown during the

American Revolution.

Mosquitoes also played a role in

steering slave ships from Africa across

the Atlantic, because plantation owners

in the Americas believed that Africans

withstood the onslaught of mosquito-

borne disease better than indigenous

slaves or European indentured ser-

vants. During the American Civil War,

Confederate forces suffered from short-

ages of the antimalarial drug quinine,

and the mosquito eventually helped

hammer the final nail in the coffin of the

institution of slavery. But these exam-

ples only scratch the surface of her

historical impact.

Malaria, a parasitic disease, is the

unsurpassed scourge of humankind. Dr.

W. D. Tigertt, an early malariologist at

Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said,

“Malaria, like the weather, seems to

have always been with the human race.”

He continued, “And as Mark Twain said

about the weather, it seems that very

little is done about it.” Even today, more

than 200 million unlucky people con-

tract malaria each year.

Malaria often produces a synchro-

nized and cyclical pattern of symptoms:

a cold stage of chills and shakes, fol-

lowed by a hot stage marked by fevers,

headaches and vomiting, and finally a

sweating stage. After a period of

respite, this progression repeats itself.

For many, especially children under 5,

malaria triggers organ failure, coma

and death.

Mosquitoes also transmit a catalog of

viruses: dengue, West Nile, Zika and

various encephalitides. While debilitat-

ing, these diseases are generally not

prolific killers. Yellow fever, however, is

the viral exception. It can produce

fever-induced delirium, liver damage

bleeding from the mouth, nose and eyes,

and coma. Internal corrosion induces

vomit of blood, the color of coffee

grounds, giving rise to the Spanish

name for yellow

fever, vómito

negro (black

vomit), which is

sometimes fol-

lowed by death.

Today, roughly

four billion people

are at risk from

mosquito-borne

diseases. As our

ancestors can

attest, our battle

with the mosquito has always been a

matter of life and death, and it’s begin-

ning to look as though this confrontation

is coming to a head.

In “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson

wrote that “our attitude toward plants

and animals is a singularly narrow one,”

that “if for any reason we find its pres-

ence undesirable or merely a matter of

indifference, we may condemn it to

destruction forthwith.” She could not

have anticipated the arrival of Crispr —

the gene-editing technology that can

tremendously speed up the meaning of

“forthwith.”

Unveiled in 2012, Crispr snips out a

section of DNA sequencing from a gene

and replaces it with another one, per-

manently altering a genome. This

innovation has been called the extinc-

tion machine because it allows us to

intrude on natural selection to wipe out

any undesirable species. Crispr has

been used to design mosquitoes that

produce infertile offspring. If those

mosquitoes were released into the wild,

the species could become extinct. Hu-

manity would never again have to fear

the bite of a mosquito.

And yet, it would also mean that

science fiction would become reality.

“We can remake the biosphere to be

what we want, from woolly mammoths

to nonbiting mosquitoes,” Henry Greely,

the director of the Center for Law and

the Biosciences at Stanford University,

told Smithsonian magazine. The ques-

tion is: “How should we feel about that?

Do we want to live in nature, or in Dis-

neyland?”

We also have valid, although yet

unknown, reasons to be careful what we

wish for. If we eradicate disease-vector-

ing mosquito species, would other

mosquito species or insects simply fill

the ecological niche? Would one disease

be swapped out for another? What

effect would eliminating mosquitoes (or

any other animal) have on mother

nature’s biological equilibrium?

But perhaps now, as in the past, we

are underestimating the mosquito. She

evolved to endure global showers of the

eradication chemical DDT and may

genetically outflank Crispr as well.

History has shown the mosquito to be a

dogged survivor. She has ruled the

earth for millions of years and has killed

with unremitting potency throughout

her reign of terror. She has steered the

course of history, scratching her indeli-

ble mark on the modern world order.

Dr. Rubert Boyce, the first dean of the

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine,

bluntly stated in 1909 that the fate of

human civilization would be decided by

one simple equation: “Mosquito or

Man?” Across the ages, we have been

locked in a life-or-death struggle for

survival with the not-so-simple mos-

quito. Historically, we did not stand a

chance.

ARMANDO VEVE

They are

our apex

predator,

the deadliest

hunters

of human

beings on

the planet.

Timothy C. Winegard

TIMOTHY C. WINEGARDis the author of the

forthcoming book “The Mosquito: A

Human History of Our Deadliest Pred-

ator,” from which this essay is adapted.

The mosquitoes

are coming for us

The diseases she

transmits cause

an endless

barrage of death.

Without her,

human history

would be

unrecognizable.

Here’s a little quiz. When was the last

time a significant social media network

was founded in the United States? And

what about a competitive search-engine

company? An online ad network? And

what about a truly wide-ranging e-

commerce start-up?

Here are the depressing answers.

The social network Snapchat, in 2011.

For search, Microsoft’s Bing appeared

in 2009, a replacement for its Live

Search. I’m drawing a blank on an ad

network. With e-commerce, the answer

is probably Wayfair, which arrived in

2002, and still has only 1.3 percent of the

market (most retail innovation has been

in niche areas, like luggage (Away) or

special fashion (The RealReal)).

To put this another way: Facebook

and its Instagram unit have close to 50

percent of the social media market,

dwarfing all the other companies in

monthly active users tenfold. Google

has about 90 percent of the search

market, with Bing and Yahoo dwindling

ever further behind by the month.

Google and Facebook also suck up 60

percent of the digital ad spend, with

only Amazon moving up aggressively in

that fast-growing space. And speaking

of Amazon, the retail giant has about 50

percent of total e-commerce sales in the

United States, with eBay and Walmart

at 7 percent and 4 percent, respectively.

We’ve all known this for a long time.

So it’s not much of a surprise that two

American government agen-

cies — the Justice Department

and the Federal Trade Commis-

sion — have finally gotten

around to looking into the dead

obvious by investigating the

market power of big tech com-

panies and whether their

dominance in a range of arenas

has hurt competition and

hindered new start-ups from

forming.

Whether it is too little too

late, and whether the govern-

ment will actually take signifi-

cant action, is another story.

And if the recent settlement by

the F.T.C. with Facebook is any

guide — the penalty is so ex-

traordinarily light that it makes

a slap on the wrist seem like

cruel and unusual punishment

— the recent upsurge in stock

prices of the tech giants under

scrutiny will continue.

To put it another way, no one in Silicon

Valley is holding her breath or is even

wary of the reasons the feds are acting.

“Would I love to see the government

Four largest competitors?” joked the

chief executive of Reddit, Steve Huff-

man, in a podcast interview with me last

week. “Yeah! That’d be great.” But he

added that he’d want government ac-

tion only for the right reasons.

Mr. Huffman went on to make a larger

and more serious point: that it has

taken regulators so long to take action

as the big tech players have amassed

such power that it might be too late. He

also noted that the size of many big tech

companies doesn’t necessarily help

them combat hate speech — and that

more competition would solve myriad

such problems faster.

Encouraging more competition is

now the direction that the government

seems to be going in, especially since

the idea of showing consumer harm —

which has been the traditional standard

for bringing an antitrust action — feels

impossible to prove here.

Instead, as the Justice Department’s

antitrust head, Makan Delrahim, said

last week in a statement, “Without the

discipline of meaningful market-based

competition, digital platforms may act

in ways that are not responsive to con-

sumer demands.”

I’ll take a step further by

saying that the way that the

tech giants have been respon-

sive to consumer demands has

lulled us all into a state of con-

tinuous partial satisfaction.

After all, who doesn’t love free

email and maps and adorable

photo posting and instant infor-

mation gratification and getting

your heart’s desire delivered in

a flash? But the fact is that we

have all become cheap dates to

these tech platforms, making a

trade-off in which they get all

the real value and we get some

free stuff that is inexpensive

and easy for them to provide.

In this setup, we consumers

are the gifts that keep on giving,

as continuing generators of

data that is monetizable and

ever more revealing to the

companies that collect that

information. But, hey, we get

Prime! We get Nest! We get Libra!

The government is now dragging in

all kinds of experts — including some of

digital tech’s prominent creators — to

understand how the technology works

and how to make a great industry more

open to innovation by replacing inade-

quate self-regulation with some real

regulation.

“Congress and antitrust enforcers

allowed these firms to regulate them-

selves with little oversight,” said Repre-

sentative David Cicilline, Democrat of

Rhode Island, who leads the antitrust

committee in the House. “As a result,

the internet has become increasingly

concentrated, less open and growingly

hostile to innovation and entrepreneur-

ship.”

This is a theme, of course, that Euro-

pean regulators have been sounding for

a long time. So, does it mean that the

reckoning is finally here in the United

States, too?

Like Reddit’s Steve Huffman, I won’t

hold my breath, largely because the

record of the government in this area

has been weak. And, of course, it is

already overreaching, as we saw in

Attorney General William Barr’s fatu-

ous speech last week calling for tech

companies to stop using advanced

encryption. (Apple are you listening?

No, you are not because you are not

spies.)

But there is no question that the tech

story is now a regulatory story, which is

good because we need the kind of con-

trol that only government can impose.

But it’s also sad because the tech story

should be one of innovation. It should be

a story of what’s next.

There are glimmers of that. Some

recent initial public offerings — I’m

thinking of Beyond Meat and Zoom —

show some promise of a future that is

not totally controlled by a few giant

companies, given that none of the mar-

ket stunners operate in areas the gov-

ernment is policing.

So, here’s another quiz: Will the

government help these newer compa-

nies, and so many others, to thrive?

Answer: Let’s hope so.

Whether

recent

government

action is too

little, too late

is another

story.

Are we finally getting serious about big tech monopolies?

ILLUSTRATION BY JEFFREY HENSON SCALES, PHOTOGRAPHS BY ED FREEMAN/STONE, AND LIONEL

BONAVENTURE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Kara Swisher

Contributing Writer

KARA SWISHERis editor at large for the

technology news website Recode and

producer of the Recode Decode podcast

and Code Conference.

Opinion

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